Telling the truth about a circus freak (Dylan Mulvaney) who is riding the culture’s psychopathology and contributing to it is not “mean” or “unproductive.”
I do the same thing.
So here’s the deal: If you want to carp about Matt Walsh, you are required to be consistent. You will need to explain to me, if you talk about this in front of me, why you’re not applying it to me. I’m going to watch, and I’m going to insist that you do it. If you don’t, I’m going to make a judgment about your character and consistency.
Because I do the same thing.
And I’m going to keep doing it.
And I’m not wrong, I’m not going too far, I’m not making my message ineffective, and I’m not doing it to service your tea party goals.
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There is one important difference between you & Matt Walsh.
You are funny. You can say "Dylan Mulvaney took a holiday in the Uncanny Valley and decided to move there" and everyone snort-laughs. Including me. That's a gift.
This brings to mind the topic of lying. I've noticed an interesting dichotomy in the reaction to that video. People seem to tackle two sides of it at once -- that it's making Walsh ineffective (so the side of overall culture war strategizing) because it's being mean/nasty/cruel to Dylan Mulvaney, an individual human (so the side of Walsh as a role model of how to be human/Catholic/a man/whatever). I don't have a term for it, but it's some weird type of predictably faulty analysis. I can envision some scenarios where "you're hurting your overall effectiveness in the culture war by being mean to this individual person" would be at least a reasonable (not necessarily valid) critique, but this isn't one.
Mulvaney is being lied to, constantly. The "OMG slay queen you're such a beautiful woman" bullshit is why so many transwomen honestly believe they pass who do not. I saw this repeatedly in undergrad. Women classmates who thought they were being kind were complimenting the transwomen to boost them emotionally in exactly the same way they would to me if I was feeling about having cut my bangs crooked or lamenting that the frames on my reading glasses look weird on my face. That kind of untruth that's meant to be kind *arguably* has some kind of place in a one-on-one relationship at least sometimes (like pretending you don't notice that someone has farted, say). But the consequences of accepting lying in public, even a little bit, are so magnified and exaggerated now that it's helping cause this societal contagion. Transwomen on magazine covers who are airbrushed into appearing more feminine and make confused 14 year old boys have hope that they too can become a woman--it's sick and wrong and horrifying.
Millions of people are lying to Mulvaney. One man told him the truth, and did so publicly in a way that will be heard by confused young people in the gray area where they may yet be saved from committing themselves to this path of self-destruction.
That's not just okay, it's laudable. Good for Matt Walsh.